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#WritersCoffeeClub 1 OctHave you written in an epistolary format

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    #WritersCoffeeClub Nov 13: Name the oldest work to have inspired youAs a kid I read the Odyssey in translation, and binged on for-kids-retellings of Ancient Egyptian mythology—mostly the later dynastic versions (some of the translations were old and hazy on the actual chronology), but with roots going back to c. 3000BCE.Nothing much got written down before then because writing either hadn't been invented or wasn't widely used for purposes other than temple accounting, AIUI.
  • #WritersCoffeeClub Nov 12th.

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    @SteveClough @cstross I write nothing more creative than documentation for the software I produce, but people misunderstand that, too.The experience of people misunderstanding my docs, or simply failing to read them, was one of the things that turned me away from evangelicalism. (I bet you didn't see that coming.) I wasn't using parables to hint at ineffable spiritual truths in the face of religious persecution: I was just explaining how software worked, how to see its current state, and how to configure and maintain systems. People who were paid to read and understand this material would not or could not do so: their repeated questions made it obvious. Within a very few years, instead of reading TFM, people developed folk stories of commands they could type that usually did something that could be mistaken for success. They veered constantly off-course, and I kept having to drag them back. They consulted each other, rather than the docs, and developed their own mythology about how the software worked. They intuitively felt they knew the software better than I did, because my approach to problem-solving was careful and methodical but they knew a golden shortcut.If concrete, human-level explanations, written out literally, landed so badly, there's no chance that people will have remembered the figurative and unfathomable teachings of Jesus seventy years after his death, written them down accurately and fully, and built from them a useful picture of worlds seen and unseen and the will of God. I'm sorry; it just doesn't ring true.
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    #writersCoffeeClub 4 Nov 'What's the funniest thing you've ever written?'The dinner party in "The Nightmare Stacks". Alex, a CS nerd (turned vampire) is visiting his very conventional middle-class parents: he takes his new girlfriend Cassie (an elven spy who is helping to pave the way for an invasion) on the back of his borrowed ... conveyance. Then they discover his sister has brought her girlfriend too, and the misconceptions start to spiral ...
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    #WritersCoffeeClubFootnote: the space opera duology I'm currently writing is set so far in the future that humanity has speciated, and there's been a LOT of time for deliberate genetic modification.One consequence is that non-UV catalyzed Vitamin D synthesis is normal: everyone is dark, for UV protection. (Also, many hominins have a vacuum-exposure reflex that opens the ductus arteriosis and bypasses the lungs, maintaining blood oxygen levels for a few minutes—time to get to safety.)